Catering to your inner geek.....
Astronomers are all excited that the Cassini spacecraft has finally reached Saturn and is sending back some pretty cool pictures, including some that may give us insight into how planets form. This makes Saturn the farthest planet to be orbited by one of our spacecraft.
"It feels awfully good to be in orbit around the Lord of the Rings" said Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
More in extended copy....
The rings commanded Cassini's initial attention because never again in the mission will the spacecraft be so close to them. At least seven discrete bands of ring material extend more than 370,000 miles from the center of Saturn. Two Voyager missions, in 1981 and 1982, detected ring particles ranging in size from nearly invisible dust to chunks of water ice the size of a house.
The Voyagers also made the discovery that tiny moons, in the gaps between ring bands, appeared with their gravitational tugs to act like shepherds herding the flocks of ice and rock. They seemed to maintain the structure of at least some of the bands and keep the gaps open.
Cassini's photography captured in even greater detail the shepherding courses of the tiny moons Pan, Prometheus and Pandora, and detected hints of the existence of much smaller moonlets. Some of the moons already found are no more than 12 miles in diameter.
link
Here's another exciting revelation, right here on Earth, which has Archaeologists both excited and worried:
the pristinely preserved ruins of an ancient civilization that was long ago lost to the mists of time in the remote cliffs of eastern Utah, then resolutely protected over the last 50 years by a stubborn local rancher who kept mum about what he knew.
The ruins, called Range Creek, are spread over thousands of acres, much of it in inaccessible back country and reachable only through a single-track dirt road once owned by the rancher and recently bought by the State of Utah. Preliminary research dates the settlement from about A.D. 900 to 1100, during the period of the Fremont Indian culture.
Researchers say the site's singularity is not its monumental architecture. The people who lived here were more apt to build humble single-family stone-walled pit houses, of which there are believed to be hundreds -- no one even knows yet -- rather than high-rise cliffside apartment complexes like Mesa Verde in Colorado.
What mostly distinguishes Range Creek is that through quirk of fate and human will, it escaped both the ravages of looters and, until recently, the spades of archaeologists. Cliffside grain-storage vaults have been found here with their lids still intact, the corn and rye still inside. And while many sites in the West can still produce an old stone arrowhead or two, researchers found whole arrows here just a few weeks ago, apparently lying in the dust just where they were dropped 10 centuries ago at the time of William the Conqueror.
The Archaeologists are really worried about looting, now that the site is known to the public. In fact, artifacts have already gone missing. I hate that about people - the "ooh, how cool, I'll take in and show it off/sell it/hide it away forever - it's just lying here, so it's OK to make it MINE. Idiots.
Or, as the case may be, not.
It turns out that the folks who say our big brains evolved because of the complex social skills involved in deceiving, lying, stealing from, cheating on and otherwise tricking other primates may be right. This theory, called the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis, was tested recently, appears to be supported by the data. Carl Zimmer writes about it over at the Loom - it's worth a read.
Finally, I don't have to tell you that dirty air is bad for you, whether it's produced by power plants or cigarettes. You already knew that. I just wish someone would tell the Shrub.